Nan Laird


Nan McKenzie Laird is a professor in Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.

Research

Laird received her PhD from Harvard University in 1975 under Arthur Dempster.
Laird is well known for many seminal papers in biostatistics applications and methods, including the Expectation-maximization algorithm.

Honors

Her honors include the Purdue University Myra Samuels Lecturer award, the Janet L. Norwood Award from the American Statistical Association, the Florence Nightingale David Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, and several other fellowships.

Selected publications

*